Thing 2 and the Protestant Reformation

This will be a quick post - I only have another 10 minutes on the desk at work. Okay, so I had this wonderful insight about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0.

Most people think that the Prostestant Reformation was just a bunch of people led by Martin Luther who objected to the ideas and practices of the Catholic church. In reality, it was much more than that, and in fact very philosophical. Before the Prostestant Reformation, it was only the priests and Pope who had access to God and the Bible. This power eventually led to corruption within the church in the form of the Vatican charging for the absolving of one's sins. Martin Luther, among many others, recognized the root underlying this corruption. Aside from the fact that few in the 1500s were literate, the Bible and church services were given in Latin, which only the educated few knew, as opposed to the local language or dialect. The Protestant Reformation, however, paved the way for one to have a personal relationship with God without having to go through a priest. Likewise, any person could read the Bible and interpret it for him or herself.

Thus, Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 have made resources more available for anyone, not just techies and those literate in HTML (I'm not even literate in HTML). Likewise, and I am by no means saying that librarians are obsolete or heading in that directions, but library patrons can access resources and do research on their own. Library resources and how one would go about accessing them have become much more user friendly. In the same vein, I do not think this minor paradigm shift is any different from the switch from card catalogs to computer cataloging. I also don't think that this advance in technology warrants as much attention that it appears to be getting. Libraries, like everything else in the world, are evolving and adjusting to new technologies. More on this later....